Time Flies...

I can't believe that its nearly the end of August already. Don't you wish you could slow it all down a bit?


Summer 2008 is almost over and all we seem to have had is rain! Thank goodness for the wonderful Great Britain Olympics team, who have bought some sunshine into a dull and dreary month for the rest of us. Just four years until it all comes to London. Let the countdown begin!


This has inspired me to make this calendar project for a class I'm teaching next week. Here's the finished article.

The doodling frenzy continues...

Not quite sure why, but I'm definitely suffering with doodle-mania at the moment. And I'm feeling pretty pleased with the results.

I've managed lots of new first time doodlings like this cute owl and robin and have been combining them with paper piecing. It just proves you don't need stamps (even if you still want them!) and the best thing is, all you need is paper scraps, pens, some good little scissors, glue and a bit of imagination. So it's cheap too!

Feeling Young At 41!

Having lost over 2 1/2 stone this last year, I celebrated in May with a surfing weekend with my girlfriends, Anne and Lynne in North Devon. One of my major inspirations for loosing weight was to get back into my wetsuit, which I hadn't worn in a good few years. I managed it and we had such a fabulous time boogie boarding on woolacombe beach in the sun, feeling so young and free (although it did catch up with me the next day, when I ached from head to toe!)



I had to capture all this on a layout and the hidden journaling says: "ok... so more like 41 but we felt like 25 riding the saves in the sun!"

Painted Glamour

I had a lovely afternoon last week doing a mica demo for Simply Craft in Cardiff.

Throughout the demo I used mica in powder, flake and tile form and using it as watercolour stamping medium went down particularly well with my appreciative audience.

By mixing the powders with water and Gum Arabic, you get a wonderful paint that can be stamped, splodged, spritzed and brushed to create wonderful effects, like these cards on the left. The mica adds such a wonderful gleam.

We also had a bit of a laugh as I sprayed webbing paint around!

Round Robin Results

In our Altered Art session this week, we tried Collaborative Indie Art - as suggested as a workshop session by Leandra from Paper Artsy.

Everyone in the group picked an item and started to decorate the base. We then passed that item around to each member of the group to add the next layer of decoration to it. Each person finished with their original item to take home.

It was great fun seeing how the different personalities interpreted the original ideas and it was challanging trying to decide how to take each piece on at each stage, as it had been started by someone else. However, we were all thrilled with the results which I felt all captured the spirit of the original people who started the project, although they hadn't seen it since the first layer of paint went on!

You can see close-ups of all the projects in the Customer Gallery at www.inspiredbliss.co.uk